Ava is so happy for Kevin. He deserves this. Even though Ava had hoped to be the one getting engaged tonight, she feels nothing but elation at the turn of events.
Kevin slips the ring on Isabelle’s finger, and the crowd cheers. Scott lets a wolf whistle fly, loud enough to summon every dog in the neighborhood.
Kevin jumps down to kiss Isabelle, and Ava’s father moves for the magnum of champagne. It’s clearly time for the sabering, and now they really have something to celebrate! Kelley pulls his saber out of the umbrella stand, opens the front door, and holds the bottom of the champagne bottle against his belt buckle. In one fluid motion, he slices the top of the bottle off; it flies into the yard. This is a trick he learned one year when he went to Paris with Margaret, supposedly taught to him by the personal sommelier of François Mitterrand. It dazzles every time.
As Kelley pours glasses of the Perrier-Jouët, Ava wonders: Did her father know Kevin and Isabelle were together? Did he know this proposal was in the works? Does he know Isabelle is pregnant?
Scott accepts two flutes of champagne and hands one to Ava. They clink glasses.
“Cheers!” she says. “I can’t believe it.”
“You were trying to set me up with Isabelle,” Scott says, “weren’t you?”
“Oh, hush,” Ava says. “The two of you would have made a cute couple, too.”
“You were jealous,” Scott says. “I saw it on your face.”
“Was not.”
“Yes, you were. When you took the picture of me, Isabelle, and the Holy Terror, you looked angry. Jealous angry.”
Ava barely suppresses a smile. She drinks her champagne. “Shut up.”
“Admit it.”
“I will not admit it,” she says. “But I will give you this.”
“What?”
“You make one hell of a Santa.”
KEVIN
I love you,” Isabelle says.
“And I love you,” Kevin says. He holds Isabelle’s left hand and kisses her finger. He bought her the best ring in the store, from a girl he went to high school with named Phoebe Showalter.
Phoebe asked him who the ring was for and he said, “I can’t tell you that yet.”
Isabelle is trembling-whether because of the pregnancy or her delirious happiness, he can’t say.
He almost didn’t summon the courage to buy the ring. He kept thinking of Norah Vale, and how much he’d loved her, how much he had invested in her, and all the ways he’d changed the course of his life to please her. First, he left Ann Arbor, even though he’d been happy there. He liked the other students, liked his professors, enjoyed the school spirit at the football games; he’d also gotten the best grades of his life. But Norah was miserable. She didn’t look for a job, didn’t make friends, and didn’t like the friends that Kevin made.
Poughkeepsie and the CIA were better. A lot of his classmates were tattooed and pierced and did drugs or drank too much, and Norah felt more comfortable among them. It wasn’t so “rah-rah,” she said. She got a job waitressing, at the Palace Diner, but then, in Kevin’s final year, she got fired for cursing out a family of six who had only left her a ten-cent tip. She screamed profanities at them in the diner’s parking lot and was canned pretty much on the spot.
So it was back to Nantucket for the two of them, where Kelley lent Kevin and Norah enough money to put a down payment on a house. They limped along for a few more years, until Norah started hanging out with a guy named Jonas who drove a taxi and sold heroin, and Kevin had no self-respecting option but to ask her for a divorce. They sold the house; Norah took the money and left.
No more women, Kevin vowed.
He kept making excuses not to enter the jewelry store. He needed a coffee, and then he needed a sandwich from the pharmacy lunch counter. Town started filling with people, and he saw Gibby the inn’s summer landscaper first, then Cheesy, whom he’d gone to high school with, and he stopped to talk. Cheesy had his five-year-old with him, and the kid was jumping up and down, shouting about how Santa was coming and he had made a list, and he was going to leave milk and cookies, and carrots for the reindeer, and glitter in the yard so the reindeer could find his house, and Kevin thought, I am going to have a child; I had better get my ass into the jewelry store. Main Street was buzzing with happy, excited energy. The trees were lit up, and the shops had their doors wide-open for last-minute shoppers; most were serving cookies and cider. The Victorian carolers were strolling in their elaborate period costumes, like something right out of Mitzi’s display at home. As the carolers passed Kevin, he heard them singing “Good King Wenceslas.” Was it going to snow? It was still too warm, but maybe, maybe tomorrow…
Kevin lollygagged for so long that it became time for the red-ticket drawing, run by the Chamber of Commerce. If you bought anything from a Chamber member during the month of December, you received red tickets. Now that it was three o’clock, the tickets were being pulled by the town crier. There would be five one-thousand-dollar winners and one five-thousand-dollar winner.
Kevin found a strip of seven red tickets in his wallet. He thought about how great it would be if he won.
The five one-thousand-dollar winners were picked. Not his number, not even close. He nearly left because he knew Ava would be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wondering where he was.
But then, the big moment! The five-thousand-dollar winner was…!
I will pay my mother back, Kevin thought. Or I will put the money right into an account for the baby.
But the number called wasn’t Kevin’s. The winning red ticket belonged to Eric Metz, who was a mechanic at Don Allen Ford and the father of six kids, one of whom was severely autistic. The crowd roared! It was always best when a local person won, not to mention a person so deserving. Five thousand dollars would mean a lot to the Metz family, especially at Christmas. But when Eric Metz went up to turn in his winning ticket, he announced that he was donating the entire five thousand dollars to Nantucket Hospice, which had taken such excellent care of his mother when she was dying of lymphoma.
The crowd was silent for a second-perhaps acknowledging that they might not be so generous with a sudden windfall-then there was an even louder roar of applause, whistles, and calls of approval.
Kevin experienced an unfamiliar feeling. He knew he had just witnessed an act of grace, and all he could think was that he wanted to emulate Eric Metz going forward.
He had walked right into the jewelry store and told Phoebe Showalter he needed a diamond ring.
And now, he and Isabelle are suspended in a bubble of bliss. Please, he thinks, nobody pop it.
He makes a vow silently.
He will be a good husband and an even better father. He will buy a place for the three of them; he will marry Isabelle, and she will get a green card and, hopefully, become an American citizen.
Kevin lays Isabelle carefully down across his bed. He lifts the hem of her Mrs. Claus dress, and starts peppering her stomach with kisses.
She says, “Oh no, Kevin! Everyone is awake!”
“So?” he says.
“So I should be helping to clean.”
“Ava will clean up,” he says.
“They’re going to think you just proposed, and now we are back here…”
He takes one of her braids in his mouth.
“Kevin!” she says. “Stop! Your family just found out about us. I am sure they are still… so shocked.”
“Who cares?” he says.
“I care!” Isabelle says. “I am still a worker here. And, listen-it sounds like something is going on.”
Kevin tries not to lose his patience. He finally has Isabelle in his bedroom without it having to be a covert mission. She is his fiancée, and he would like to make proper love to her immediately. But he closes his eyes and listens. There does seem to be some kind of ruckus in the main room of the inn.